Slow VMs

For the past few years I've always run Virtual Machines off solid state drives, simply because faster = better.

I've been planning out a workshop related to basic virtual machine setups to a bit more advanced topics such as vlans, segements, etc. In planning out the course I ended up working on a normal HDD rather than a SSD by accident and noticed all of my Windows VMs I had created in VMWare were painfully slow to load after a restart or two. A bit of quick Googleing and I've come up with a few tricks to massivley speed up Virtual Machines running of a good ol' fashioned hard-drive. I'll keep a changelog of what changes in this post at the end of the post.

Superfetch

SuperFetch is a feature that was introduced back in Windows Vista. It sits quietly in the background, constantly analyzing RAM usage patterns and learning what kinds of apps you run most often. Over time, SuperFetch marks these apps as “frequently used” and preloads them into RAM ahead of time.... (https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/what-is-superfetch/)